{"id":1022,"date":"2026-06-04T10:47:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-04T10:47:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/coco-erasmus.eu\/?p=1022"},"modified":"2026-06-09T09:23:22","modified_gmt":"2026-06-09T09:23:22","slug":"blog-article-1-when-the-room-is-not-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coco-erasmus.eu\/?p=1022","title":{"rendered":"Blog Article # 1: When the Room Is Not Enough"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Have you ever been to a meeting where the right people are in the room, the topic genuinely matters, and yet somehow the conversation never quite goes where it should? A few voices (usually the most senior ones) end up doing most of the talking, and you spend the session waiting for an opening… but it never comes. Then the notes arrive a few days later, and they are accurate. But if you read them carefully, you will notice that what was agreed looks a lot like what the most confident people in the room already thought before they sat down.<\/p>\n

If you work in higher education or civil society, you are probably familiar with this scenario. The reasons rarely come down to bad faith or insufficient motivation. More often, it is a failure of design. Without careful structure, familiar hierarchies tend to reassert themselves, and the voices that already carry the most institutional weight come to dominate. What might have become shared reasoning stays at the level of individual observation, and the conversation closes without having changed much.<\/p>\n\n\n

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The COCO consortium’s Guidelines for Deliberative Mini-Publics (DMPs)<\/strong><\/a> were developed as a direct response to this pattern, offering a method for creating, through deliberate design, the conditions under which something different becomes possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The guidelines are structured around three phases: Before the DMP<\/strong> (preparation), During the DMP<\/strong> (facilitation), and After the DMP<\/strong> (follow-up), because how a session is designed before anyone enters the room is just as consequential as what happens during it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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